description & set texts
M.A. seminar, 2 hrs/wk, 4 credits
Instructor: Tibor Frank, Ph.D., D.Litt., Professor of History
Students in this class examine the outstanding achievements of American historians, the various approaches to writing and teaching U.S. history, theories and methods of the major schools of American historians. Papers will survey the period from the mid-19th century through recent years., with special emphasis on innovative interpretations.
Seminar Topics
• Great events and figures in U.S. history
• Great historians in the United States
• Major theories of history writing
• Classic and recent methods of writing U.S. history
• New ideas in the philosophy of history
• History and literature
• History and the social sciences
• History and the humanistic tradition
• The European origins of American history writing
• The language of American history
• US history—US histories
• Toward a post-modern history?
Recommended Readings
• Appleby, Joyce, Lynn Hunt & Margaret Jacob. Telling the Truth About History.
New York-London: Norton, 1994.
• Commager, Henry Steele. The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays.
in Historiography(New York, Knopf, 1967.
• Foner, Eric, ed. The New American History.
Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990.
• Grob, Gerald N. and George Athan Billias, eds.
Interpretations of American History: Patterns and Perspective.
Vols. 1-2, 6th ed., New York: The Free Press, 1992.
• Higham, John. History: Professional Scholarship in America.
Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990.
• Kraus, Michael and Davis D. Joyce. The Writing of American History.
Rev. ed., Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
• Molho, Anthony and Gordon S. Wood, eds. Imagined Histories:
American Historians Interpret the Past.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998.